State Senate President Stephen Sweeney announced Thursday that he would challenge the governor’s decision to remove New Jersey from a multistate initiative to reduce greenhouse gases, through a rarely used legislative action.

Governor Christie, a Republican, ended New Jersey’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, in 2011. The cap-and-trade program is an agreement between some East Coast states that forces utilities to purchase credits for their carbon emissions. Money from these purchases goes to promote green initiatives.

Christie has called RGGI “a failure.”

“RGGI does nothing more than tax electricity, tax our citizens, tax our businesses, with no discernable or measurable impact upon our environment,” the governor said when he stopped the state’s participation three years ago.

To push New Jersey back |into participating, Sweeney, D-Glouces­­ter, wants to force a rule change that would mandate re­entry into RGGI. He said the initiative has reduced emissions and attracted green jobs to the state.

“We are blocking him from killing RGGI through regulation,” said Sweeney.

This is not the first time that Sweeney has used a resolution to fight one of Christie’s decisions. Previously, Sweeney objected to changes the Christie administration proposed to remove some testing requirements in the civil service system, which is used to hire and promote some public employees.

Democrats said Christie’s changes would lead to corruption and nepotism. The Legislature passed a resolution saying that Christie’s new rules did not comply with the original intent of the state’s civil service laws.

Sweeney’s path forward on RGGI is similar and involves complicated parliamentary maneuvering. A court case followed Chris­tie’s decision not to participate in RGGI.

The court ruled that the administration’s unilateral pullout was improper and required that it |go through a rule-making process. In response, the administration published new rules to pull the state out of the cap-and-trade initiative.

Democrats now have introduced a resolution that says Chris­tie violated legislative intent when he wrote the rules to pull out of RGGI. Democrats claim that previous state laws ordered the administration to participate in the collaboration – laws that could not be ignored. If the resolution passes the Legislature, the administration would have 30 days to rewrite or amend the rules. After this time, if the Legislature is still not satisfied, it could pass another resolution that would force a rule change.

To fight Christie, Sweeney chose to use an arcane legislative process that one senator called “uncharted territory” when used to fight civil service changes earlier this year. Even if they force a rule change, a court battle may still be fought over participation in the program.